What’s Worth Watching: Anthony Mackie, Jamie Dornan caught up in sci-fi-horror ‘Synchronic’

In directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s 2019 sci-fi-horror film “Synchronic,” paramedics Steve Denube (Anthony Mackie) and Dennis Dannelly (Jamie Dornan) stumble across a series of bizarre injuries and deaths in New Orleans linked to Synchronic, a new designer drug with apparently hallucinogenic qualities.

But it’s more than that. Learning about Synchronic forces the characters to question their realities as they come to realize that the only thing worse than getting stuck in your past is getting stuck in the distant past.

As paramedics, and often in their personal lives, Dennis and Steve are constantly on the run. But when they finally slow down to process the absurd things happening around them, time seems to stop.

In the meantime, Dennis’s daughter is moving out, and Steve is coming to terms with a rare cancer diagnosis. In a host of senses, time is running out.

The film opens on a blurred image that slowly clears to reveal a pair of clasped hands. A man and a woman sitting together on a bed give each other a knowing look before taking a pair of S-stamped pills and settling in to sketch and watch television.

The woman wakes up alone. Out of the corner of her eye, she notices movement behind the television. Branches and moss begin growing out of the wall with unnatural speed, snaking across the room in every direction. She freezes, terrified.

In the elevator on the seventh floor, the man feels a shift as dust begins to rise around him. The floor number flickers, and suddenly it appears as though a desert is opening up in front of him. And just as the scene clears, he falls.

The woman sees a face emerge from the branches. A snake crawls across the bed covers, and she is powerless to stop it.

The monotonously sinister score strings the film’s time-jumping, nonlinear scenes together. But when the music fades, the whole film seems to crumble. The lighting changes, the scenes lengthen, the dialogue suddenly feels staged.

For the majority of the film, the characters, constantly preoccupied with their pasts and terrified of the future, neglect the present. But when they are literally thrown into the (very dangerous) past and constantly confronted with an unwelcome but imminent future, savoring the present starts to seem worthwhile.

It’s about taking things for granted. It’s about self-preservation and self-sabotage. It’s about holding on and letting go.

Mackie is widely known for his role as Sam Wilson/Falcon in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Irish actor Dornan as Christian Grey in the “Fifty Shades of Grey” films. “Synchronic” is available on Netflix.